Your stories

Taryn blogs about mental health and wellbeing. What do they mean to you?

Taryn OzorioPosted on 24/01/2011

About mental wellbeing

What is mental wellbeing?

Mental wellbeing describes your mental state – how you are feeling and how well you can cope with day-to-day life. Our mental wellbeing can change, from day to day, month to month or year to year.

If you have good mental wellbeing (or good mental health), you are able to:

feel relatively confident in yourself – you value and accept yourself and judge yourself on realistic and reasonable standards

feel and express a range of emotions

feel engaged with the world around you – you can build and maintain positive relationships with other people and feel you can contribute to the community you live in

live and work productively

cope with the stresses of daily life and manage times of change and uncertainty

Mental wellbeing is just as important as physical wellbeing, and you need to maintain both in order to stay fit and healthy.

If you work in the ambulance service, it's especially important for you to look after your mental wellbeing.

Our research shows:

91% of ambulance personnel have experienced stress and poor mental health at work.

Emergency services personnel are more likely to experience a mental health problem than the general workforce, but you are less likely to take time of work as a result.

You work hard to prevent mental health problems affecting your performance at work, but this can come at a large personal cost, impacting relationships and physical health.

What can affect my mental wellbeing?

We all have times when we have low mental wellbeing – when we feel sad or stressed, or find it difficult to cope.

Your mental wellbeing can be affected by work-related factors like:

repeated exposure to traumatic events

workload pressures

lone working

long working hours

shift work

dealing with people who may be physically or verbally abusive

Working in the ambulance service is a job where you have to be a healer, a vicar and a listener - where you have got to take the wars, the strife, the complaints and the aggression that people give you.

Your mental wellbeing can also be affected by other things in your life, for example, if you:

suffer some sort of loss

experience loneliness

have relationships problems

are worried about money

Sometimes, there is no clear reason why we experience a period of poor mental health.